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Thursday, August 15, 2013

The Problem with “Privilege” (2013)

For a much longer and detailed version, see my essay in the book Geographies of Privilege

In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing
projects over the years, I frequently found myself participating in
various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their
gender/race/sexuality/class/etc. privilege. These workshops had a bit
of a self-help orientation to them: “I am so and so, and I have x
privilege.” It was never quite clear what the point of these
confessions were. It was not as if other participants did not know the
confessor in question had her/his proclaimed privilege. It did not
appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political
projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their
privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project
themselves. The benefits of these confessions seemed to be
ephemeral. For the instant the confession took place, those who do not
have that privilege in daily life would have a temporary position of
power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and
forgiveness. The sayer of the confession could then be granted
temporary forgiveness for her/his abuses of power and relief from
white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt. Because of the perceived benefits
of this ritual, there was generally little critique of the fact that in
the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of
domination it was supposed to resist. One of the reasons there was
little critique of this practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to
those who seemed to be the “most oppressed.” Those who had little
privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the
judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to
be oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new
heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered. “I may
be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me to
be oppressed when we played together.” Consequently, the goal became
not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible.
These rituals often substituted confession for political
movement-building. And despite the cultural capital that was, at least
temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed,
these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as
the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized
subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.

These rituals around self-reflexivity in the academy and in activist
circles are not without merit. They are informed by key insights into
how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute
who we are as subjects. Political projects of transformation
necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as well.
However, for this process to work, individual transformation must occur
concurrently with social and political transformation. That is, the
undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their
privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position,
but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the
systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that
produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not
initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice.
Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were
shaped by structural forms of oppression. However, the response to
structural racism became an individual one – individual confession at
the expense of collective action. Thus the question becomes, how would
one collectivize individual transformation? Many organizing projects
attempt and have attempted to do precisely this, such Sisters in Action
for Power, Sista II Sista, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, and
Communities Against Rape and Abuse, among many others. Rather than
focus simply on one’s individual privilege, they address privilege on an
organizational level. For instance, they might assess – is everyone
who is invited to speak a college graduate? Are certain peoples always
in the limelight? Based on this assessment, they develop structures to
address how privilege is exercised collectively. For instance, anytime
a person with a college degree is invited to speak, they bring with
them a co-speaker who does not have that education level. They might
develop mentoring and skills-sharing programs within the group. To
quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn, “You don’t think your way
into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way
of thinking.” Essentially, the current social structure conditions us
to exercise what privileges we may have. If we want to undermine those
privileges, we must change the structures within which we live so that
we become different peoples in the process.

This essay will explore the structuring logics of the politics of
privilege. In particular, the logics of privilege rest on an
individualized self that relies on the raw material of other beings to
constitute itself. Although the confessing of privilege is understood
to be an anti-racist practice, it is ultimately a project premised on
white supremacy. Thus, organizing and intellectual projects that are
questioning these politics of privilege are shifting the question from
what privileges does a particular subject have to what is the nature of
the subject that claims to have privilege in the first place.

The Confessing Subject

My analysis is informed the work of Denise DaSilva. She argues in Toward a Global Idea of Race that
the western subject understands itself as self-determining through its
ability to self-reflect, analyze and exercise power over others. The
western subject knows that it is self-determining because it compares
itself to ‘others” who are not. In other words, I know who I am because
I am not you. These “others” of course are racialized. The western
subject is a universal subject who determines itself without being
determined by others; the racialized subject is particular, but is
supposed to aspire to be universal and self-determining.

Silva’s analysis thus critiques the presumption that the problem
facing racialized and colonized peoples is that they have been
“dehumanized.” Anti-racist intellectual and political projects are
often premised on the notion that if people knew us better, we too would
be granted humanity. But, according to Silva, the fundamental issue
that does not get addressed, is that “the human” is already a racial
project. It is a project that aspires to universality, a project that
can only exist over and against the particularity of “the other.”

Consequently, two problems result. First, those who are put in the
position of racialized and colonized others presume that liberation
will ensue if they can become self-determining subjects – in other
words, if they can become fully “human.” However, the humanity to which
we aspire still depends on the continued oppression of other
racialized/colonized others. Thus, a liberation struggle that does not
question the terms by which humanity is understood becomes a liberation
struggle that depends on the oppression of others.

Silva’s analysis implies that “liberation” would require different
selves that understand themselves in radical relationality with all
other peoples and things. The goal then becomes not the mastery of
anti-racist/anti-colonialist lingo but a different self-understanding
that sees one’s being as fundamentally constituted through other
beings. An example of the political enactment of this critique of the
western subject could be glimpsed at the 2008 World Social Forum that I
attended. The indigenous peoples made a collective statement calling
into question the issue of the nation-state. In addition to challenging
capitalism, they called on participants to imagine new forms of
governance not based on a nation-state model. They contended that the
nation-state has not worked in the last 500 years, so they suspected
that it was not going to start working now. Instead, they called for
new forms of collectivities that were based on principles of
interrelatedness, mutuality and global responsibility. These new
collectivities (nations, if you will, for lack of a better world) would
not be based on insular or exclusivist claims to a land base; indeed
they would reject the contention that land is a commodity that any one
group of people should be able to buy, control or own. Rather, these
collectivities would be based on responsibility for and relationship
with land.

But they suggested that these collectivities could not be formed
without a radical change in what we perceived ourselves to be. That is,
if we understand ourselves to be transparent, self-determining
subjects, defining ourselves in opposition to who we are not, then the
nations that will emerge from this sense of self will be exclusivist and
insular. However, if we understand ourselves as being fundamentally
constituted through our relations with other beings and the land, then
the nations that emerge will also be inclusive and interconnected with
each other.

Second, the assumption that we have about liberation is that we will
be granted humanity if we can prove their worthiness. If people
understood us better, they would see we are “human” just like they are,
and would grant us the status of humanity. As a result, anti-racist
activist and scholarly projects often become trapped in ethnographic
multiculturalism. Ironically, in order to prove our worthiness, we put
ourselves in the position of being ethnographic objects so that the
white subject to judge our claims for humanity.

Rey Chow notes that within this position of ethnographic entrapment,
the only rhetorical position offered to the Native is that of the
“protesting ethnic.” The posture to be assumed under the politics of
recognition is the posture of complaint. If we complain eloquently, the
system will give us something. Building on Chow’s work, this essay will
explore how another posture that is created within this economy is the
self-reflexive settler/white subject. This self-reflexive subject is
frequently on display at various anti-racist venues in which the
privileged subject explains how much s/he learned about her complicity
in settler colonialism and/or white supremacy because of her exposure to
Native peoples. A typical instance of this will involve non-Native
peoples who make presentations based on what they “learned” while doing
solidarity work with Native peoples in their field research/solidarity
work, etc. Complete with videos and slide shows, the presenters will
express the privilege with which they struggled. We will learn how they
tried to address the power imbalances between them and the peoples with
which they studied or worked. We will learn how they struggled to gain
their trust. Invariably, the narrative begins with the presenters
initially facing the distrust of the Natives because of their
settler/white privilege. But through perseverance and good intentions,
the researchers overcome this distrust and earn the friendship of their
ethnographic objects. In these stories of course, to evoke Gayatri
Spivak, the subaltern does not speak. We do not hear what their
theoretical analysis of their relationship is. We do not hear about how
they were organizing on their own before they were saved/studied by
these presenters.

Native peoples are not positioned as those who can engage in
self-reflection; they can only judge the worth of the confession.
Consequently, the presenters of these narratives often present very
nervously. Did they speak to all their privileges? Did they properly
confess? Or will someone in the audience notice a mistake and question
whether they have in fact become a fully-developed anti-racist subject?
In that case, the subject would have to then engage in further acts of
self-reflection that require new confessions in the future.

Thus, borrowing from the work of Scott Morgensen and Hiram Perez, the
confession of privilege, while claiming to be anti-racist and
anti-colonial, is actually a strategy that helps constitute the
settler/white subject. In Morgensen’s analysis, the settler subject
constitutes itself through incorporation. Through this logic of
settlement, settlers become the rightful inheritors of all that was
indigenous – land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture.
Thus, indigeneity is not necessarily framed as antagonistic to the
settler subject; rather the Native is supposed to disappear into the
project of settlement. The settler becomes the “new and improved”
version of the Native, thus legitimizing and naturalizing the settler’s
claims to this land.

Hiram Perez similarly analyzes how the white subject positions itself
intellectually as a cosmopolitan subject capable of abstract theorizing
through the use of the “raw material” provided by fixed, brown bodies.
The white subject is capable of being “anti-“ or “post-identity,” but
understands their post-identity only in relationship to brown subjects
which are hopelessly fixed within identity. Brown peoples provide the
“raw material” that enables the intellectual production of the white
subject.

Thus, self-reflexivity enables the constitution of the white/settler
subject. Anti-racist/colonial struggles have created a colonial
dis-ease that the settler/white subject may not in fact be
self-determining. As a result, the white/settler subject reasserts
their power through self-reflection. In particular, indigenous peoples
and people of color become the occasion by which the white subject can
self-reflect on her/his privilege. If this person self-reflects
effectively, s/he may be bestowed the title “ally” and build a career of
her/his self-reflection. As many on the blogosphere have been
commenting recently (see for instance @prisonculture and @ChiefElk), an
entire ally industrial complex has developed around the professional
confession of privilege

Of course, this essay itself does not escape the logics of
self-reflexivity either. Rhetorically, it simply sets me up as yet
another judge of the inadequacies of the confessions of others. Thus,
what is important in this discussion is not so much how particular
individuals confess their privileges. If Native peoples are represented
problematically even by peoples who espouse anti-racist or anti-settler
politics, it is not an indication that the work of those peoples is
particularly flawed or that their scholarship has less value.
Similarly, those privileged “confessing” subjects in anti-racism
workshops do so with a commitment to fighting settler colonialism or
white supremacy and their solidarity work is critically needed.
Furthermore, as women of color scholars and activists have noted, there
is no sharp divide between those who are “oppressed” and those who are
“oppressors.” Individuals may find themselves variously in the position
of being the confessor or the judge of the confession depending on the
context. Rather, the point of this analysis is to illustrate the larger
dynamics by which racialized and colonized peoples are even seen and
understood in the first place.
The presupposition is that Indigenous peoples are oppressed because
they are not sufficiently known or understood. In fact, however, this
desire to “know” the Native is itself part of the settler-colonial
project to apprehend, contain and domesticate the potential power of
indigenous peoples to subvert the settler state. As Mark Rifkin has
argued, colonial logics attempt to transform Native peoples who are
producers of intellectual theory and political insight into populations
to be known and hence managed. Native struggles then simply become a
project of Native peoples making their demands known so that their
claims can be recognized the by the settler state. Once these demands
are known, they can they be more easily managed, co-opted and
disciplined. Thus, the project of decolonization requires a practice of
what Audra Simpson calls “ethnographic refusal” – the refusal to be
known and the refusal to be infinitely knowable. The politics of
decolonization requires the proliferation of theories, knowledge, ideas,
and analyses that speak to a beyond settler colonialism and are hence
unknowable.

Alternatives to Self-Reflection

Based on this analysis then, our project becomes less of
one based on self-improvement or even collective self-improvement, and
more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we
currently have no language.

There is no simple anti-oppression formula that we can follow; we are
in a constant state of trial and error and radical experimentation.
In that spirit then, I offer some possibilities that might speak to new
ways of undoing privilege, not in the sense of offering the “correct”
process for moving forward, but in the spirit of adding to our
collective imagining of a “beyond.” These projects of decolonization
can be contrasted with that of the projects of anti-racist or
anti-colonialist self-reflexivity in that they are not based on the goal
of “knowing” more about our privilege, but on creating that which we
cannot now know.

As I have discussed elsewhere, many of these models are based on
“taking power by making power” models particularly prevalent in Latin
America. These models, which are deeply informed by indigenous peoples’
movements, have informed the landless movement, the factory movements,
and other peoples’ struggles. Many of these models are also being used
by a variety of social justice organization throughout the United States
and elsewhere. The principle undergirding these models is to challenge
capital and state power by actually creating the world we want to live
in now. These groups develop alternative governance systems based on
principles of horizontality, mutuality, and interrelatedness rather than
hierarchy, domination, and control. In beginning to create this new
world, subjects are transformed. These “autonomous zones” can be
differentiated from the projects of many groups in the U.S. that create
separatist communities based on egalitarian ideals in that people in
these “making power” movements do not just create autonomous zones, but
they proliferate them. These movements developed in reaction to
the revolutionary vanguard model of organizing in Latin America that
became criticized as “machismo-leninismo” models. These models were so
hierarchical that in the effort to combat systems of oppression, they
inadvertently re-created the same systems they were trying to replace.
In addition, this model of organizing was inherently exclusivist because
not everyone can take up guns and go the mountains to become
revolutionaries. Women, who have to care for families, could
particularly be excluded from such revolutionary movements. So,
movements began to develop organizing models that are based on
integrating the organizing into one’s everyday life so that all people
can participate. For instance, a group might organize through communal
cooking, but during the cooking process, which everyone needs to do
anyway in order to eat, they might educate themselves on the nature of
agribusiness.

At the 2005 World Social Forum in Brazil, activists from Chiapas
reported that this movement began to realize that one cannot combat
militarism with more militarism because the state always has more guns.
However, if movements began to build their own autonomous zones and
proliferated them until they reached a mass scale, eventually there
would be nothing the state’s military could do. If mass-based
peoples’ movements begin to live life using alternative governance
structures and stop relying on the state, then what can the state do?
Of course, during the process, there may be skirmishes with the state,
but conflict is not the primary work of these movements. And as we see
these movements literally take over entire countries in Latin America,
it is clear that it is possible to do revolutionary work on a mass-scale
in a manner based on radical participatory rather than representational
democracy or through a revolutionary vanguard model.

Many leftists will argue that nation-states are necessary to check
the power of multi-national corporations or will argue that
nation-states are no longer important units of analysis. These groups,
by contrast, recognize the importance of creating alternative forms of
governance outside of a nation-state model based on principles of
horizontalism. In addition, these groups are taking on multinational
corporations directly. An example would be the factory movement in
Argentina where workers have appropriated factories and seized the means
of production themselves. They have also developed cooperative
relationships with other appropriated factories. In addition, in many
factories all of the work is collectivized. For instance, a participant
from a group I work with who recently had a child and was breastfeeding
went to visit a factory. She tried to sign up for one of the
collectively-organized tasks of the factory, and was told that
breastfeeding was her task. The factory recognized breastfeeding as
work on par with all the other work going on in the factory.

This kind of politics then challenges the notions of “safe space”
often prevalent in many activist circles in the United States. The
concept of safe space flows naturally from the logics of privilege.
That is, once we have confessed our gender/race/settler/class
privileges, we can then create a safe space where others will not be
negatively impacted by these privileges. Of course because we have not
dismantled heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism or
capitalism, these confessed privileges never actually disappear in “safe
spaces.” Consequently, when a person is found guilty of his/her
privilege in these spaces, s/he is accused of making the space
“unsafe.” This rhetorical strategy presumes that only certain
privileged subjects can make the space “unsafe” as if everyone isn’t
implicated in heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism and
capitalism. Our focus is shifted from the larger systems that make the
entire world unsafe, to interpersonal conduct. In addition, the
accusation of “unsafe” is also levied against people of color who
express anger about racism, only to find themselves accused of making
the space “unsafe” because of their raised voices. The problem with
safe space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible.

By contrast, instead of thinking of safe spaces as a refuge from
colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, Ruthie Gilmore suggests
that safe space is not an escape from the real, but a place to practice
the real we want to bring into being. “Making power” models follow this
suggestion in that they do not purport to be free of oppression, only
that they are trying to create the world they would like to live in
now. To give one smaller example, when Incite! Women of Color Against
Violence, organized, we questioned the assumption that “women of color”
space is a safe space. In fact, participants began to articulate that
women of color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized
that we could not assume alliances with each other, but we would
actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful
was rather than presume that we were acting “non-oppressively,” we built
a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures
of white supremacy/settler colonialism/heteropatriarchy etc. We then
structured this presumption into our organizing by creating spaces where
we would educate ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis
were particularly problematic. The issues we have covered include:
disability, anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and
anti-Arab racism, transphobia, and many others. However, in this space,
while we did not ignore our individual complicity in oppression, we
developed action plans for how we would collectively try to
transform our politics and praxis. Thus, this space did not create the
dynamic of the confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead, we
presumed we are all implicated in these structures of oppression and
that we would need to work together to undo them. Consequently, in my
experience, this kind of space facilitated our ability to integrate
personal and social transformation because no one had to anxiously worry
about whether they were going to be targeted as a bad person with undue
privilege who would need to publicly confess. The space became one
that was based on principles of loving rather than punitive
accountability.

Conclusion

The politics of privilege have made the important
contribution of signaling how the structures of oppression constitute
who we are as persons. However, as the rituals of confessing privilege
have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building social movements
for global transformation to individual self-improvement. Furthermore,
they rest on a white supremacist/colonialist notion of a subject that
can constitute itself over and against others through
self-reflexivity. While trying to keep the key insight made in
activist/academic circles that personal and social transformation are
interconnected, alternative projects have developed that focus less on
privilege and more the structures that create privilege. These new
models do not hold the “answer,” because the genealogy of the politics
of privilege also demonstrates that our activist/intellectual projects
of liberation must be constantly changing. Our imaginations are limited
by white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., so all ideas we have
will not be “perfect.” The ideas we develop today also do not have to
be based on the complete disavowal of what we did yesterday because
what we did yesterday teaches what we might do tomorrow. Thus, as we
think not only beyond privilege, but beyond the sense of self that
claims privilege, we open ourselves to new possibilities that we cannot
imagine now for the future.

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